Unbowed, Ex-draft Evader Comes Home After 39 Years

February 24, 2000|By Dahleen Glanton, Tribune Staff Writer.

ATLANTA — Insisting he has no regrets or animosity, Preston King, a 63-year-old political scientist who spent more than half his life in exile because a draft board in Georgia did not address him as mister, returned to the U.S. on Wednesday after 39 years in England.

His voice trembling and his eyes filled with tears, King walked into the arms of more than two dozen family members who traveled across the country for the homecoming they have diligently sought for decades.

FOR THE RECORD - This story contains corrected material, published March 1, 2000.

King, who speaks with a slight English accent, offered no apologies for his decision in 1961 to flee the country. In England, he pursued his doctorate and now is a professor of political science at Lancaster University.

"It feels overwhelming," said King, standing beside his daughter, Oona King, a member of Britain's Parliament (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).

She spearheaded the effort to push for her father's return to the U.S.

"The fact that I am here is indicative of the significant change that has taken place here. I've got a lot to learn. I'm like a Rip Van Winkle. I go out one day and 39 years later, I'm back."

King, a member of a prominent family of civil rights leaders from Albany, Ga., about 200 miles south of Atlanta, was issued a full pardon by President Clinton on Monday. The pardon allowed him to return to the U.S. for the funeral of his eldest brother, Clennon, in Albany on Thursday. He had missed the funerals of a number of other family members, including his mother and father.

"I didn't think I would see this day," said King's brother, Marvin, 78. "Still, there are so many people who don't understand what my brother did, and I have to feel sorry for them. They really don't have the truth.

"My daddy didn't raise no Aunt Jemimas. He (Preston King) did what he had to do. He had to stand up for his rights."

King's exile in England began in 1961, when U.S. Federal District Judge William Bootle sentenced him to 18 months in prison for draft evasion.

King, the youngest of seven brothers, registered with the Selective Service board in 1954. The local draft board granted King deferments to pursue an education, including a master's degree at the prestigious London School of Economics. He received notice that his deferment was ended as he prepared to pursue a doctorate.

King says he suspected his race played a key factor in the board's action.

The draft board was all-white. In its early correspondence, it referred to him as "Mr. Preston King" or "Dear Sir."

But one day, he says, he showed up at the board's offices in person to express his thanks for the deferment. The secretary saw he was black, and from then on, he said, the correspondence referred to him as "Preston."

King initially ignored notices from the board, then wrote back in 1959, "I have received government orders with which I cannot in principle comply due to an immediately conspicuous defect in form.

"In your correspondence with me, conducted in the name of the Board, you have adopted a style and tone which I consider quite frankly harsh and very nearly bullying," he wrote.

King informed the board that "any such correspondence received by me shall simply be ignored, regardless of personal consequences."

If the board would simply revert to calling him "Mr. King," he said at the time, he would report for service. But the use of only the first name was demeaning, he said.

"It was a matter of the way people thought of blacks, that they were supposed to be more subservient and that they were supposed to think about agriculture or domestic work, things of that sort," said Paul King, another of his brothers.

When King came home in 1960 to lecture and visit his family, he was arrested.

During his three-day trial in U.S. District Court at Albany, King's defense lawyers, including his brother C.B. King, sought to prove discrimination.

But King offered no evidence that white candidates were addressed differently from blacks. And there was no testimony about any white student being granted a deferment in similar circumstances.

King was released pending appeal, but he jumped his $2,500 bond and returned to England.

Judge Bootle, 97 and long retired, was among those who petitioned President Clinton for the pardon.

"Mr. King was deeply sensitive to what he recognized as this long-lasting, deeply rooted method of racial discrimination," Bootle wrote in a letter to Clinton.

"So he replied that if the board would go back to addressing him as `Mr. King,' he would report for military service, and that otherwise he would not."

King had, Bootle said, "followed his conscience just as Rosa Parks had followed hers."

Rosa Parks' refusal to go to the back of a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala., started a black boycott of the public transit system, a signal event in the American civil rights struggle.

"I believe that he has paid a big enough price for what he did, and that there is so much water gone under the bridge that he ought to be able to come home," Bootle said.